Highest technology

[Mr. Tea]

Facebook seems to me to be more about being a member of cliques, groups, fan clubs and so on than individualism per se.

[zhao]

If there is a trend of people becoming more lonelier then I believe Facebook surely plays an interesting part in this but isn't the cause something way bigger than Facebook: individualism? Anyway, nice and interesting read. Surely recognize some of the things they mention.

yes the technology chicken came after the individualism egg... the 2 have been working superbly well over the last century or 2...

[Mr. Tea]

Now this is fucking amazing:

Two British men who have been totally blind for many years have had part of their vision restored after surgery to fit pioneering eye implants...When light enters the eye and reaches the chip it stimulates the pixels which sends electronic signals to the optic nerve and from there to the brain.



Bollocks to fancy phones, this is what technology is for.

[HMGovt]

Yeah, yeah, giving sight to the blind by implanting a ZX81 is all very laudable, but how about zapping structures inside cells using femtosecond lasers like wot they use in that round a corner camera thing

http://www.gizmag.com/femtosecond-laser-scalpel/22424/

"The device is so precise that it can reportedly target individual cells or even parts of cells, such as nuclei."

Mr Tea, I would be interested in what you consider the very apogee of technological advancement currently extant. I read in i yesterday that 1 exaflop computer is being built in India that could in theory accommodate an uploaded brain, but somehow I don't think that would be sufficient to properly model, simulate or instantiate a proper, working mind.

[Mr. Tea]

That's a very good question. I work in a hi-tech company but I'm a lot less into the nitty-gritty of this or that latest chip than you might think. At the risk of blowing 'my' own horn, some of the stuff 'we' (I'm not involved in actually designing or building anything, mind) do at work is pretty impressive. The mirrors in the machines we've built in the last couple of years are smooth to within about a nanometre, which means that if they were the size of Holland the biggest deviation from the designed curvature would be about a millimetre. In fairness they're made for us by Zeiss, but once they're here they have to be put together with similar tolerances. It's just nuts.

That laser scalpel is amazing, the idea that surgeons can target parts of cells, wow...

Of course the standard argument that the money that goes into developing anything like this would be better spent educating a few million women in the third world and vaccinating their kids against boring but serious diseases cannot be got away from.

Not heard about that computer, pretty impressive but I've read some fairly convincing arguments (Doug Hofstadter, Roger Penrose) as to why the brain doesn't act 'merely' as a very complex organic Turing machine and that attempts to implement anything like a brain in silicon using standard paradigms are pretty much doomed, regardless of how powerful you can make the computer. Then again, who knows what will come of quantum computing, or genetic computing, or whatever else people are working on.

'Exaflops' is a great word, sounds like holiday footwear for aliens.

[yyaldrin]

U work at ASML?

[Mr. Tea]

U work at ASML?

Yeeup.

[Mr. Tea]

"Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic"

[HMGovt]

Drone Swarm gets reflective, makes musical.
I believe drones will turn out to be as important for the progression of humanity as domesticated animals were. You don't see baboons herding cattle, but humans presumably strolled out of the plains wearing robes with herds of the fuckers. Where will swarms of semi- or fully-autonomous drones lead us? Hopefully not into our graves, but into outer space and the deep ocean instead.

[Mr. Tea]

The future is behind you:

[Mr. Tea]

More here:

[Leo]

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram


http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...-a-single-gram

[drilla]

Stem cells converted from adult blood cells

http://zeenews.india.com/news/health/exclusive/blood-cells-coaxed-back-into-stem-cell-state_18467.html

[HMGovt]

Two new contenders

3d projection into free space with negatively refracting metamaterials
http://www.materials360online.com/newsDetails/40222

Quadcopters getting frisky
http://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d...adcopters.html

[Patrick Swayze]

Now this is fucking amazing:

Two British men who have been totally blind for many years have had part of their vision restored after surgery to fit pioneering eye implants...When light enters the eye and reaches the chip it stimulates the pixels which sends electronic signals to the optic nerve and from there to the brain.



Bollocks to fancy phones, this is what technology is for.

what was the kids cartoon show where the girl was like a detective and she said "click" then could take a mental image of what she saw

would be cool if they added that in